


Gestalt

by mitsein, seinmit



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bodyswap, Coffee, Cosmic Adventures, Extravagant Imagery, F/M, Metaphysical Sex, Psychedelia, The Meaning of the Universe, magical sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 08:41:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20306641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitsein/pseuds/mitsein, https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: The universe around them skipped from moment to moment, without any regard for the way time usually flowed. Stephen was gut-wrenchingly aware when each now passed from one to the next, always already disappearing before it even existed. He felt caught up in an old fashioned projection film, frames flickering slow enough to perceive, but at the same time he was aware that nothing was different at all.“I think we found the problem,” he said, but it came out of Christine’s mouth.





	Gestalt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [28ghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/gifts).

> Thank you so much [Rosefox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosefox) for your invaluable help in making sure this made the amount of sense I wanted it to--and not a smidgeon more.
> 
> I was inspired by these tags, 28ghosts: Characters Wander Into The Extra Kinky Part Of The Magical Forest, Sex Magic, Sex Magic Gone So Wrong It's Right As Long As You Don't Mind A Little Body Horror, There's A Fine Line Between Cutesy Magical Realism And Horror
> 
> It turned out to be the "cosmos" instead of a forest, it didn't quite end up as "sex magic," and neither "cutesy magical realism" nor "horror" quite explained the tone. I hope it satisfies regardless.

Strange twitched his fingers and the world went sideways, splitting _what is_ into the shards of _what could be_. He traced one of infinite tangents from this moment in his life, his mind translating the _possibilia_ of each twitching neutrino into both space that he could navigate and technicolor glow. 

It had been a surprise to discover that the metaphysical bones of the universe had the same basic aesthetics as a prog-rock album cover, but by now he was used to it. 

He traced one line of light—a timeline, divergent from this one by a quantum shiver—feeling the itch underneath his skin that told him something was wrong. These unrelated worlds were supposed to stay distinct, but sometimes something happened and the perfect parallel lines became tangled.

Noticing the moments when this happened—little moments where the basal causal isolation of the different worlds broke down and suddenly, the reverberations of an alien choice inspired an alternate world to shift—was like running your hand across a smooth surface looking for minuscule nicks. He found the knot of interconnection and felt it like biting down on metal. He closed his eyes and saw the pink and green light blend together in a sickly swirl. 

He breathed deep and his fingers curled and the worlds slotted back into their individual grooves. Tension released. 

He opened his eyes again and waited, mind gently probing the hallways he had opened underneath the phenomenal world. 

All was well once more. He’d check again in a bit.

* * *

One of the first things he did, after the exciting first days of his new career, was teach himself calligraphy. All the journals in the library were written in beautiful scripts and his physician chicken-scratch had only gotten worse with the shaking of his hands. 

But his hands were an insurmountable barrier to anything better. He had purchased a gorgeous fountain pen and ink in an appropriately cosmic shade of deep purple, but every attempt he made left splatters. His lines wobbled over the sheet. 

He gave up on using his corporeal body and figured out how to produce a lovely old-fashioned hand with his mind and power. 

It wouldn’t do for his literal calling cards to be illegible. There was an image to maintain. 

When he succeeded in producing a swooping, extravagant signature, he sat back and smiled at it before looking up in a reflexive way to find someone to brag too. 

The library was empty, of course, and he rolled his eyes at himself. 

He mentally nudged the color of his ink into an even more lurid purple and transformed the everyday paper he had been practicing on into a yellowing scrap of parchment. 

_Dr. Palmer,_ he wrote. _Imagine handing an Rx that looks like this to the pharmacist. _

He paused a moment and added, _Come visit and bring some gruesome stories, I miss them._

With that, he slipped the parchment through the seams of the world and landed it on Christine’s desk. 

A few minutes later, he reconsidered and added a shiny gold wax seal on the folded note.

* * *

Another day, another slow evaluation of the edges of separate universes. 

At a superficial glance, he could almost think of this routine like rounds at the hospital, but it felt entirely different. Rounds always had a circus sort of feel, with the attending in the role of ringmaster, coaxing and correcting residents in turn. Each case was presented and (metaphorically) dissected. All the different brains involved would analyze the patient and then they’d visit, check in on the person in the flesh. 

This was nothing like that. He had yet to run into anything sentient on his daily maintenance and wandering. It was spell-checking, on a cosmic scale. 

It was untwisting barbed wire and fixing fences, keeping the density matrices of different quantum fields discrete much as one would prevent cows from grazing themselves lost. 

When he was a kid, he’d been fascinated with cowboys for a couple of weeks before he realized that his discomfort with the family dog wouldn’t translate well to the ability to handle a herd of giant cattle. 

Also, he’d never been able to do nothing for very long, and if there was consensus in serious writing about the West, it was that stoic men did a lot of vague contemplating. 

He’d left John Wayne behind, mostly, though he’d been accused of being a cowboy surgeon. 

Dr. Shah should see him now, he thought. Now he really was a lonesome cowboy on the ontological range. 

A giant creature floated by. It looked like an inflated turquoise tardigrade with an unsettling swirling mouth. He tilted his head and evaluated, but apparently this thing, like him, belonged in the backstage of the universe.

* * *

He was a proud man, but even he had his limits. 

_Save me,_ he texted Christine.

Because she was a nicer human than he, she did come. She even brought snacks. 

She sat in the front room of the New York Sanctum, entirely incongruous with the rusted metal artifacts and abundance of velvet. She had a no-nonsense ponytail and a t-shirt that was just a few shades off of hospital scrubs. 

Stephen ate an Oreo. 

“What do you do all day?” she said, taking a sip from her coffee. 

“You’re going to think I’m joking when I say this, but I’m entirely serious: I contemplate the universe,” he said. 

She laughed and waved her hand. “I’m laughing because it's funny to imagine _you_ doing that, not because I think you’re joking.”

“It’s hard to adjust to a total lack of residents to terrify,” he said. “If I want to feel powerful, I have to go watch C-beams glitter off the shoulder of Orion.” 

She pointed at him with her carrot stick, humus dangling precariously off the tip. 

“That is not even the right line from _Blade Runner_, Strange. You’re better than that.” 

“Me fifth element—supreme being. Me protect you,” Stephen said cheerfully. 

She rolled her eyes and said, “What does contemplating the universe actually look like?” 

“_Tron_ meets the wormhole scene in _Contact_ as drawn by a geometry professor on acid,” he said. 

“That’s—vivid.” 

“You wouldn’t believe the colors,” he said. “Apparently the pure essence of the universe is groovy.” 

She laughed and he felt pleased with himself in a direct and human way that he wasn’t getting much of lately.

Maybe that was what prompted him. 

“Want to see?” he said. “I bet I could take you along.” 

Her eyes went wide. She clearly thought about it, flicking her gaze over to his cape, which was curled up like a cat in a patch of sun below the window. Maybe she was reminding herself that he wasn’t actually crazy, or at least that she was already along for the ride. 

“Sure,” she said. “If you get me trapped in some mirror dimension to be eaten by Cthulhu, I’m going to be pissed.” 

“If we are very lucky,” he said, “you might see one of these grazers—they seem to eat impossibilities and they look like wrinkly slugs with stubby legs and a horror show for a face. Cute, though. Most likely, it’ll just feel like you're watching me play with a very elaborate Lite-Brite.”

“I’ll pretend I’m very impressed,” she said and smoothed her hands over her jeans. “Right now?” 

“Right now,” he agreed. He felt a little giddy with it. He snapped his fingers and the cloak perked up, fluttering over to hang around his neck. 

He snagged her hand and she raised one eyebrow. He grinned. 

“You don’t want me to lose you,” he said. “And anyway, I no longer violate the Strange rule.” 

“You’re every kind of strange,” she said. “Getting stranger by the day.” 

He squeezed her and dragged them down, out into the wings. 

The sanctum unfolded into familiar super-saturated lines of color and light. 

He heard Christine take a quick breath. 

“These are all possibilities,” he said. “That’s essentially the basic power of magic—of the whole universe. Possibilities, causes, and the way things could maybe be.” 

“I’m not sure what that means,” she said. “But I’d kill for a skirt that color.” 

She pointed, but Stephen knew what she meant without needed the physical index. Her attention on the thick scarlet thread brought his attention following along. They were in this shared mental construct, so their minds could drag each other along. 

The thread felt wrong. 

“You have a knack for this,” he said. “Something is up with that. Now, make sure you tell me exactly how impressed you are with me when you watch me fix this.” 

She made a little face at him, but followed easily when he started walking. The universe felt more tangible today and he had a more visceral sense of physicality. Usually it felt more like the memory of walking, but right now he could feel his limbs and muscles work. 

They walked. The environment around them quivered and Stephen kept thinking there was movement out of the corner of his eye. It was silent, eerily so. The wild bursts of color and light made him feel the absence of an orchestral score. 

“Remember the music visualizers?” Stephen said suddenly. “iTunes used to have them.” 

“This is a little like that,” she said, finishing for him. “I think for the first time I actually believe you’re not _just_ crazy.” 

He laughed and they kept walking. He saw the timeline they were following and wondered what it would be like to step inside. What was happening in that universe that led to this discordant feeling underneath his fingernails? 

Tiny lines of scarlet emanated out from the main timeline, like capillaries disappearing into flesh. They disappeared as quickly as he could notice them, but they kept coming. 

The line had a fuzziness to it, an inchoate set of so-called boundaries. That was very unusual. He had only ever seen tangles of whole timelines, boundaries and borders clear but twisted up. This was more like the timeline was dissolving, leaking out into space-time. 

But that didn’t make sense. All the timeline meant was a series of causes, interconnected actualities extended into space. It was on face incoherent for it to leak and reach out into other possible worlds—if it did that, it should create its own possibility. 

The line was both there and not, everything and nothing. It was a possible world and it was impossible—it caused itself and was indistinguishable from its close neighbors, no space between their quantum songs and its own. 

“Interesting,” he said. 

“What?” she said. 

“Sometimes I think I should have gotten my PhD in magic instead,” he said. “Bench science is so boring. And you can’t beat this view.” 

Whatever surface they were walking on was now over a vast void. She gasped, noticing the blackness stretching out into an abyss below them, but in a time shorter than an instant it was filled with color that seared its residue on the back of Stephen’s eyelids. 

“Jesus,” she said and the splashes of color jittered apart into pixels, crashing into each other and reforming. 

The universe around them skipped from moment to moment, without any regard for the way time usually flowed. Stephen was gut-wrenchingly aware when each now passed from one to the next, always already disappearing before it even existed. He felt caught up in an old fashioned projection film, frames flickering slow enough to perceive, but at the same time he was aware that nothing was different at all. 

“I think we found the problem,” he said, but it came out of Christine’s mouth. 

Her eyes widened and he tasted them. “What the fuck,” she said. He didn’t speak it, or even hear it—he felt it, twitching down his forearms and making his hair stand up. 

He brushed his own palm against his skin and gasped, a lurching jolt of pleasure like a wet mouth around his cock. 

Christine staggered toward him and reached for his shoulder and he felt it curl around his kidney, gloved and gently moving it for the scalpel. 

He got wet, felt it dripping between his thighs, awareness teetering between a body that took up the space his body normally did and one much smaller. He reached for her, trying to grab her hard enough to ground himself in something that was the normal sense of real. 

His sense of touch skittered away and left him floating in just the feeling of another presence with him, like that was the only thing that lingered in this strange glitched out-section of the multiverse. 

He was still reaching, he could see that, and his arm stretched further and further away from him, or maybe he was falling away from it. Falling away from her, but she was was right there, underneath his tongue and in his nose. All he smelled was ozone, but it smelled like her. 

“Stephen—“ she said, and he heard it. But it was meaningless. He attached the sounds to his name, and the concept of names, and the idea that he might have a name, and he knew it was referring to himself, but it slipped past him anyway and fell into the void. 

He breathed in distance between them and exhaled them closer. He knew that he could lose her but he needed to keep her, knew that this malfunction wasn’t caused by them but, as often happened in this line of work, it could only be solved by them. This bone-deep knowledge was the least peculiar thing about this present moment, if it was even a moment as opposed to some sort of non-moment or quasi-moment. It was just the intuition of expertise, the same way he never used to think about his hands while a patient was coding underneath them. 

His hands—they didn’t shake except from the oscillations of the universe. Noiseless music of the celestial spheres, produced by the spinning friction of glass-on-glass. He paused, fascinated by his own still hands, and in that moment of self-involvement, Christine skipped away like a pebble on water. 

He dove in after her, a wet shock, and felt drag holding him back like swimming against a current. The flaw of this universe was its centrifugal force, separating things out that should be interconnected. 

He could feel an immense pressure pushing him away from her, keeping him from her, from anything, separating him into his component atoms—blood into plasma and serum. But the error here was that there should be no atoms, there were no such thing as atoms—he had a magician’s understanding of quantum theory, but the universe he walked was made of woven strings and the violin music played on them both, at the same time and indistinguishable. 

The glitch was to turn matter into pixels and legos, made of building blocks, separate and apart from selves. It was a created thing and artificial. The universe that worked was nested symphonies and spontaneous connection, the beautiful intertwined systems of cell and organ and body and ecosystem spiraling outward and inward, infinitely complex and just a simple unity. 

He and Christine, they could not be built of atoms. 

He knew that and felt atoms drop around him like raindrops were marbles. At first they fell straight down, entirely parallel. They had enormous speed, cutting through the void with no resistance, and there was no ground for them to hit. All things were stable and still, clicking forward like clockwork and not changing at all. 

“Christine,” he shouted. His breath exploded from him. It scattered the atoms away from him like poppyseeds, just a small swerve in a tiny corner of this vast bouncing universe. But that swerve was enough to send all the atoms careening against each other, creating bubbles of alternate universes where they bounced a different way, pressing up against the surface of time like abscesses under skin. 

He could move in a way he couldn’t before, he could make choices of which path to take—but it wasn’t enough. The movement had a deterministic clatter and each atom was its own thing, separate and apart.

If he had enough time and stubbornness, he thought, he could totally explain this universe. He could write it down like computer code, with each moment of contact between atoms specified. Even the swerve and its interconnected chaos—someone had the complete, unabridged guide to everything that would ever happen in the spaces he was looking. Everything was just calculations by an overwhelming intellect.

But then he knew that was wrong. It wasn’t like that. Stephen couldn’t prove it, but he knew it. 

Maybe he could tell a story about true chaos and randomness and indeterminacy—a scientist’s story. But magic was about romance and he didn’t need any of that. 

He knew that it was impossible to know all things, because he knew people and he knew his past and with every choice there was a breath where anything could happen. Christine—she’d kissed him without him expecting it at all. She'd dumped him that way, too. 

But their physical separation hadn’t snapped the reflexive ways their beings reached for one another. He felt the immensity of connection—not just to her, but to the whole universe he belonged in, a vast tapestry. In himself he contained the whole that was his home. He reached within and tugged on a single thread.

He felt warmth against his back and he leaned into it, felt her hands hold his hips. He felt that curve in his own palms and kissed the back of his own neck. The warmth of her body built until he was on fire and the fire spread—jumping from atom to atom without regard for the gap, burning them up and turning them from undifferentiated ash. 

He gasped, his breath stuttering in his chest, and felt a bead of sweat drip down his back. Her body pressed it to his and it wicked up into her clothes, into his skin. 

“Fuck me,” he said. 

“Is that your professional opinion?” she said. 

He laughed, and the laughter was fire, too. She didn’t so much as enter him as she went through him, her cock taking him like fire licks at kindling. The pleasure rocked him, jumping down his spine, and they moved together. 

They were the same, but not quite—enough different that he could feel complete because she was joined to him. 

They were kissing, because they could not be doing anything else, and he was on top of her without having moved at all. They shared breath and he felt rain on his skin—not like marbles anymore, but splashing, and pooling. When puddles meet they only hold their coherence briefly before gushing together and becoming something new. 

Somehow, it did not put the fire out. 

He got wet. His pussy was soaking, his skin was soaking, and the current he had been pressing against before, as he was swimming to reach for her, had boiled, become steam, and was now crashing back down. 

When he came he felt his muscles quiver and he dragged her deeper into himself. 

She spilled into him and then disappeared inside him, or he disappeared inside her. 

All was nothing. Not even black, just nothing. 

And then, there was light. 

The light beside his sofa, in fact, clicking on just like normal. He was inescapably aware of his body as a thing among things—sofa, chair, countless books. _Cloak_, jeez, where did that thing even go this whole time?

But he was not a thing alone—he saw that light, the hiss of his steam radiators pressed against his ears as sound, he could not escape them. 

“Stephen,” she said behind him. 

He turned around. Christine looked a little stunned. He had to think that he did too. 

He couldn’t help himself. He closed the distance between them and pressed his hand to her palm. He felt her skin. It was warm, but in a normal human way. He felt himself disappear into her, but in a normal human way. 

“To be fair to me,” he said, after a long silence. “It really isn’t normally like that. Also, we don’t work together anymore.” 

“Don’t worry,” Christine said. “I’m not sure that even counts as sex. Did we fix it?” 

That was a good point. 

It took some courage for him to twist reality again, just enough that he could poke his head up and verify the clattering wrongness had dissipated. It had—they had filled the discordant gaps with presence and made the crimson thread whole once more. He shook it off and smiled at her. 

“We did. Thank you. Want me to teach you how to take a rabbit out of a hat next?” he said. 

“I’m allergic,” she said. 

He felt like he should be more rattled by what had happened, but he wasn’t. She seemed mostly fine, too. There was some sense to that. 

In some way, they had saved some unknown universe. In another sense, they had fucked for the first time in years. In yet another sense, they had done nothing different than anyone in the world ever did, which is to say: exist. 

Christine sat back down and ate an Oreo. Stephen joined her. He asked her for any particularly gruesome tales from the shop and listened when she told him.

* * *

After she had left, he decided to check once more on the state of metaphysics. 

When he opened his eyes in the right way, he realized that what had once been lines were now waves. They crashed into one another and then dissipated into the whole before vibrating into something like individual being once again. 

It all still had an eye-searing color palette. He was glad that hadn't changed. 

He had some time before bed, so he walked up to the edge of the water and stepped into a river he’d never enter twice.

**Author's Note:**

> My deepest apologies to Heraclitus, David Lewis, Lucretius, Aristotle, Plato, Derrida, Laplace, and Merleau-Ponty. Probably others I'm forgetting right now! I ripped off a large chunk of Western metaphysics for this story about superheroes banging. Also, I know far more about metaphysics than quantum theory, but luckily Stephen doesn't know anything about either. Let's say all the mistakes are his. 
> 
> me, while writing: somehow this fic is taking a strong stance against the theory of the atom. so, that's the sex i'm writing right now.


End file.
